Employees Only Podcast

Jul 2016

In March, I decided to take upon myself the project of creating an internal
Podcast at Shopify. When I signed in early 2013, there was 150 people on the
team. Today, Shopify is ten times that size with over 1,500 employees. When I
started, you had a fairly good idea of what was going on at the company. Between
lunch, team emails, our internal tool for sharing accomplishments, Friday demos
and conversations in the kitchen—you had a decent picture of what people were
working on. As the headcount continued to double, it became more and more
difficult to maintain this overview. Finally, one day in late February I was
browsing the organization chart and decided I had to understand what more of
these faces were actually doing.

Being in the middle of growth at this rate is extremely rare. Experiencing this
in R&D first hand, and later, Production Engineering, I have learned tons about
how organizations evolve. You go from trusting a tight, small team of people
with their own expertise, to trusting teams. You see people jumping around
teams. Prioritization aligning across a department. Balancing hiring. Complete
re-organizations. Sudden changes of direction involving 10s of people as
priorities change. An increased focus on building tools and process to make
everyone more effective. Projects become increasingly ambitious as the lowest
hanging fruit has been plucked, requiring more cross-team communication and
understanding the history of decisions that lead one up to the current state.

I wanted to understand how other departments have tackled this tremendous
growth. I wanted to be able to appreciate the work that they do, which is often
completely transparent to other parts of the organization if done well. I felt
the best way to do that was to reach out to people, get a handful of resources
and come up with a bunch of questions. Inviting people to lunch over a 3-page
question sheet felt too extreme. However, if it would be recorded and shared
with the rest of the company in some form, suddenly that’s not so weird. I
didn’t want to transcribe it, because we already had plenty of text content
internally. Second, this is not my full-time job, just a one hour a week
side-project. Transcribing is incredibly time-consuming, as a colleague who’d
done something similar in the past pointed out. Audio has become a prevalent
medium in the past couple of years. Podcasts and Audiobooks becoming more and
more popular. An internal-only podcast seemed like a great addition to all the
videos and text we were already producing and consuming internally.

To get the initial content, I scheduled calendar events with four people. A week
before the interview I’d ask them for resources about their role and projects:
books, articles, videos, Podcasts, brain-dumps, whatever. This was a fantastic
forcing-function to learn about areas of an organization I didn’t know much
about. I learnt about business development, and got a completely new
appreciation for it. Doing an interview with our government relations person
forced me to learn much more about lobbying in Canada and Canadian politics. A
day or two before the interview, I send my questions to the person being
interviewed so they can note down key points to the questions. Since I don’t do
any editing, it’s important to me people attempt to come in as poised as
possible. It would also help me figure out if there was anything I missed.
Because I didn’t want to end up in the rabbit-hole of recording equipment I
decided that an iPhone would do. I still use this today, with a pass in Audacity
to reduce ambient noise.

After having the first four interviews in the bank came the next problem:
hosting the episodes. There is a ton of great software out there to host your
podcast. However, it’s all build with the reasonable assumption that your
podcast will be public. This podcast would only be for the employees of Shopify,
and would hold confidential information. Additionally, standard podcast software
only supports unauthenticated endpoints. The last problem is that when an
employee leaves the company, they cannot continue to receive new, confidential
information on this stream. I built a quick extension to our Intranet that would
give each employee a unique endpoint to subscribe to the podcast feed. If
someone leaves the company the feed will automatically vanish.

When it launched, it was a big hit! The first episode was downloaded by ~30% of
the company. Since then, every two weeks I have released a new episode. The
number of listeners has climbed as it’s shared within the company and more
people join the company. I have received a lot of great feedback on the podcast.
Today, 11 episodes have been released.

Shopify Capital

Shopify Plus

Individual Contributor Director

HTTPS Storefronts

Diversity

Branding

Business Development

Support

Garage Team

Government Relations

VR

I have done public speaking in the past. Evaluating video recordings of public
speaking and Podcasts are two completely different things. Public speaking is
one-way communication. You can get a sense of the audience by attempting to
assert the room, but that’s about the real-time feedback you get. Podcasts are
completely different. It’s a conversation. Anything can happen. Outside of
journalism, you don’t get an opportunity to evaluate the way you have
conversations with people and interview them often. It’s helped me identify how
to ask better questions to help people communicate their message as clearly and
coherently as possible. In the beginning, I was fairly tied to my questions and
their structure as it was new to me. Now, I’m more confident in running
interviews and can jump around more. I still believe writing out the questions
and doing plenty of research beforehand is valuable. It helps you ask the right
questions, provide context for listeners and confidently go off-track and back.

I highly recommend this to other companies that have hit the size where this
makes sense. How many employees that means, I don’t know, and I doubt a magical
number exists. Send some of your interesting employees an email, read something
about their role, put a recorder in front of them and ask them questions!